Monday, November 26, 2012

Peace on Earth

One
of the great dreams of peace lovers everywhere was that the United Nations
would be the way toward understanding between nations and the evidence shows
that it has helped; but the great challenge today has to do with internal
conflicts in so many nations on earth.by Charlie
Leck

This morning’s NY Times displayed an unsettling
photograph on its front page. A large and aged cargo truck was jammed with
citizens of the Northern Kivu Province of the Congo and someone on the ground
was handing up a nearly naked baby to be added to the crush of people seeking
to escape the violence that wracks their nation. Over the last several weeks
rebels have taken control of Goma, Kivu’s capital. Another photo that heads the
story of the violence in the Congo shows a boy (of ten or so) in a hospital
bed, recuperating from a gunshot wound he suffered when the rebels took control
of Goma.

“GOMA, Democratic Republic of Congo — The
lights are out in most of Goma. There is little water. The prison is an empty,
garbage-strewn wasteland with its rusty front gate swinging wide open and a
three-foot hole punched through the back wall, letting loose 1,200 killers,
rapists, rogue soldiers and other criminals.”

The fierce and
troubling wars of our times are happening within nations as they struggle for a
semblance of freedom and the kind of human rights that you and I know in this
country. We forget – most of us do, anyway – how rare are such rights to free
speech and free assembly around the world.

We concentrate
on the well-told stories of civil unrest in Syria and Egypt and forget about
places like the Congo (I hesitate to call it by its established name, the
Democratic Republic of the Congo).

Joseph Kabila is
the President of the Democratic Republic of the Congo and he is quite universally despised. Riots are
commonplace all across the nation – in places with names we’ve heard nothing
or very little about over the years – in Bukavu, Kinshasa, Butembo, Kisangani
and Bunia.

Billions of
dollars of aide have poured into the Congo for peacekeeping purposes. In spite
of the funds, the nation has descended into a frenzied and uncivilized place.
The Congo is essentially ruled by various criminal organizations, each headed
by classic godfathers who are at war with each other over pieces of turf that
these criminal organizations want to control.

And, the United
Nations seems helpless in its efforts to solve this violence. There are no
central leaders or diplomats with whom to negotiate – no governments with which
to plead for mercy.

The Congo is
only one of the places where such internal unrest is threatening the lives and
sanity of peoples who live there… there is also the Ivory Coast, Sudan, Jordan,
Syria, Yemen, Bahrain, Algeria, Lebanon, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan,
Burma, Somalia and Libya. It is a volatile world right now and it is frankly
more than the United Nations can handle.

If you think it
is petty to pray for peace, God help us all! This is a time for peace-keepers
and for great thinkers to find ways out of this chaos. It is time for all of us
to pray for such peace-keepers.

_________________________

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About Me

I write these blogs to leave behind a full picture of me for my grandchildren. I had no such snapshot of my own grandparents and what they believed and how they thought. Ad Astra, you probably know, is Latin for To the Stars. Without being literal about it, it's my final destination (where I "shall forever sit, triumphing over death, and chance, and Thee, O Time").